(updated April 2026)
What this year’s WebAIM Million means for small comms teams
Uncertainty around making online content accessible often leads to second-guessing and rewrites. But the latest WebAIM Million results suggest a few consistent changes can make your content easier to manage and easier for people to use.
Global survey shows increasing web accessibility errors
The latest WebAIM Million report tracks the most common accessible content errors on the world’s top million home pages. Now in its 7th year, the 2026 results show a reversal of the steady improvements seen in previous years.
A key culprit appears to be increasing home page complexity. This is attributed to more reliance on third-party frameworks and AI-assisted ‘vibe coding’. As pages become more complex, accessibility errors become more common and harder to manage over time.
There are some encouraging signs. Government and not-for-profit sectors are performing well above average, proving that with the right focus and processes, improvement is achievable.
The good news for your comms workload is that improving content accessibility doesn’t always take big technical fixes.
By building a few simple processes into how content is created and updated, you can make a meaningful difference. Not just for people with disability, but for everyone using your site.
What are the most common content accessibility errors?
The 2026 study found an average of 56.1 accessibility errors on each of the million home pages analysed. This is a 10.1% increase on the previous year, all but wiping out the 10.3% gain made in the year prior. The 5 most common errors have stayed the same for the past 7 years:
- low-contrast text (83.9% of home pages)
- missing image alt text (53.1%)
- missing form input labels (51%)
- empty links (46.3%)
- empty buttons (30.6%).
As mentioned above, home page complexity keeps worsening. Over the past year alone the average number of elements on pages increased by 22.5%. Elements are all the things that make a page; the text, images, buttons, forms, videos, links and menus.
Because the survey uses a detection tool to pick up home page errors, it can’t detect every issue. That means the number of actual accessibility errors is likely to be greater than reported.
What’s notable is not just how common these errors are, but how consistent they’ve remained. It suggests that they’re less about technical difficulty and more about everyday content processes.
The reasons behind the errors
Some of the most frequent reasons I hear people give for not making their websites more accessible include:
- content accessibility is too complicated
- accessible websites are expensive
- I’m not sure how to make things more accessible
- other priorities are more pressing right now
- disabled people don’t use our site.
It’s not that teams don’t care. It’s just that accessibility can sound like extra work in an already overwhelmed schedule. Especially when accessibility isn’t always visible in day-to-day decision-making.
The business case for accessible content
Aside from being the right thing to do, ensuring your website is accessible makes good business sense.
If you need to make the case internally, it can help to frame accessibility in practical terms. In practice, improving accessibility often reduces support requests, clarifies messaging and saves time rewriting content. It makes it easier to justify alongside other priorities – especially when time and resources are tight.
Given more than one in 5 Australians identify as having disability, it’s likely that many visitors to your site would appreciate better web accessibility. There are also those who don’t identify as disabled, and those who experience temporary or situational disability. Perhaps a broken arm makes it difficult to use a mouse, or a noisy environment presents hearing challenges.
It’s also worth revisiting your organisation’s stated mission and values. If inclusion is among them, accessible content should be a priority.
Who decides on what makes content accessible?
Web accessibility is about designing and building websites so that anyone who wants to use them can. For most organisations, this doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means improving what already exists in a manageable way.
Internationally, web accessibility standards are developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards are known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and set out how to make digital content more usable, understandable and robust for everyone.
In Australia, accessibility isn’t optional. It’s embedded in the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), which requires organisations to provide equal access to goods and services. That includes digital ones.
For Australian Government agencies, WCAG compliance is a baseline requirement. WCAG Level AA is the minimum standard. Since January 2025, the Digital Experience Policy has strengthened the government’s focus on accessibility, inclusion and performance.
Victoria goes a step further. Victorian Government agencies are required to follow international plain‑language standards and aim for content that can be understood at around a Year 8 reading level, wherever practical. The goal is to create information that people can read, understand, and use.
For organisations and non‑profits, particularly those working with government or funded programs, aligning with these standards isn’t just best practice. It helps ensure digital services are inclusive, accessible and legally sound. It also ensures they genuinely work for every Australian who rely on them.
Big accessibility problems have simple solutions
Building a fully accessible website begins in the planning and development stages. But that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your existing website. Small changes started today reduce ongoing effort.
If everything feels urgent, these are the changes most likely to reduce rework and make your content easier to manage:
- Add alt text every time you upload an image so you don’t have to come back to update them later.
- Use an online tool to check colour contrast so you don’t need to revisit design decisions.
- Describe links so users find what they need without having to contact your customer service team.
- Use heading tags so screen readers can make sense of it and content doesn’t need restructuring.
- Include captions and transcripts for videos so everyone can understand without relying on the audio.
- Ditch flashy graphics and keep things simple to avoid untangling complexity errors later.
These small changes are often the ones that create the most ongoing friction when they’re missed. And – as the WebAIM Million shows – the ones that makes the most difference for site visitors.
Want to dive deeper? Following is how these common issues show up in practice and how you can address them quickly and simply.
‘Addressing just these few types of issues would significantly improve accessibility across the web.’
WebAIM Million Report, 2026
Colour choices matter for accessible web content
The most common issue flagged in the WebAIM results is colour contrast. This refers to how well a text colour stands out against its background.
Globally, one in 12 males and one in 200 women experience some form of colour blindness, with certain colour combinations – such as red/green and blue/yellow – particularly problematic
Issues around colour contrast often stem from brand design decisions made without considering accessibility. Fixing these problems later is costly in both time and money. It’s yet another example of the practical and cost benefits of including accessibility early in design decision-making.
To comply with the WCAG Level AA standards, colour contrast ratios should be 4.5:1 for standard body text and 3:1 for larger text (14pt bold or 18pt regular).
There are loads of free tools that make checking colour contrast easy and quick. WebAIM has a contrast checker on its site, while Vision Australia also has a colour contrast analyser.
Does everything on the page need meet colour contrast guidelines?
Logos and other decorative or artistic elements don’t need to meet colour contrast requirements. But ask yourself why those things are on the page. Do you want to visitors to perceive them? If so, they might as well be as accessible as possible along with the rest of your content.
It’s also important to not rely on colour alone to convey information. For example, there’s a trend towards using links that use different coloured, or bolded, text but no underline. If visitors can’t perceive that colour difference, they won’t know the text is a link.
Alternative text makes images more accessible
Images and graphics are important for breaking up text, conveying information in different ways and making a page look more appealing. But problems arise when the images don’t have alternative text. It’s one of the simplest accessible content fixes, but also one of the most consistently missed.
Alternative text, or image alt text, is important because it:
- enables screen readers to announce details of the content for people who have visual or cognitive impairments
- describes what should be there if an image doesn’t load
- supports SEO by helping search engines understand and rank page content.
According to the latest WebAIM Million report more than half of all home pages had images missing alt text. Of those that did have alt text, 10.8% had unhelpful descriptions such as ‘image’, ‘graphic’ or an indecipherable file name.
How to write useful alt text
It takes less than a minute to fill in the alt text box every time you upload a new image to your site. Just remember to:
- keep it brief but helpful
- describe its purpose within the context of the page
- if the image contains a link, include that information in the alt text
- if the image is decorative and adds no value, no alt text is needed
- leave out ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’. Screen reader software alerts the user to what an element is
- only include SEO keywords if they benefit the description.
Give buttons and form labels a purpose
The WebAIM Million found about one in 3 home page forms had missing form field labels. It also found 30.6% had empty buttons. When forms are added to pages as an afterthought, accessibility considerations are often overlooked.
Accessible forms have labels that describe each field and are not overwritten once the user starts to fill in the form. Error messages should also be easy to understand and not colour dependent.
If your form is long, add an option for users to save where they’re up to so they don’t have to start again if they’re interrupted part-way through.
Button wording should be clear and descriptive so users know what to do with them. Instead of ‘click here’ or ‘read more’, choose words that are concise, distinctive and task specific.
These are the sorts of accessible content issues that often get introduced gradually; especially when content is created under time pressure.
Empty or ambiguous links cause navigation problems
Screen readers let users scan a page, providing a list of links to select from. If the link text doesn’t make its purpose or destination clear, it can create confusion and frustration for your site’s visitors.
Empty links have no, or incomplete, functional information to explain where they lead. The most common types of empty links are those that sit behind images and icons.
Ambiguous links are those that provide no, or inadequate, description. Link text such as ‘read more’, ‘click here’, or ‘see details’ are repetitive and unhelpful. So-called naked links, which use the URL itself as the anchor text, are also inaccessible as they don’t provide enough information about the link’s purpose. They are also cumbersome for screen reader users who must hear them read out. If a full URL needs to be displayed – such as for legal reasons – you can add the plain language destination title as alt text so that is what the screen reader reads out.
Poor links lead to a poor experience for all users
As well as supporting assistive technology users, descriptive links help all site visitors. Eye tracking technology shows we scan pages for clickable items; a process known as ‘information foraging’. Vague wording on links means your site’s visitors need to take more time to figure out what a link is for, which can lead to frustration.
Structure headings for accessible navigation, not graphic design
Tagged headings are important because they are the main way screen readers navigate web content. They’re also essential for SEO. The WebAIM Million showed use of these headings increased 20.4% in just one year. Their application, however, is not consistently user-friendly.
While each page of a website should have a single H1-tagged heading to make the page content clear, the report found 18.1% of home pages had more than one H1. This was an increase from 16.3% the previous year.
After H1, headings should follow a sequential order – H2 to H6 – with the larger numbers acting as a container for the smaller numbers. But the WebAIM findings showed instances of skipped heading levels in one in every 25 headings.
How to set up accessible heading hierarchy
To set up headings on web pages, don’t rely on styling such as bold and different font sizes. Proper heading structure is marked in HTML with an ‘H tag’.
If you use a block editor, such as in WordPress, pay attention to the style you choose for text modules.
Choose Heading 1 (H1) for your main page heading. H1 usually contains the focus SEO keyword for the page, indicating the main topic and purpose of the page for screen readers and search engines.
Choose Heading 2 (H2) as your subheading, using it to further explain the page’s purpose. Ideally, each page should also have only one H2 heading, although this will depend on your site’s content style and structure.
After setting the H1 and H2, you can use as many of the others as you need to organise your content. You don’t need to use every heading level. Just remember to use them sequentially so they’re useful to screen readers.
W3C has detailed information to help you better understand heading tags.
Accessible content is also good for organic search results
Making your content accessible not only benefits users with disability and makes things more convenient for others, it also enhances your site’s visibility and performance in search engines.
Better user experience: when more people can access your content it leads to higher engagement and longer time spent on your site, which is a trust signal to the search engines.
Better indexing by search engines: accessible websites are easier for search engine crawlers to index, with features like image alt text and proper heading structures helping search engines to better understand your content.
Higher search rankings: accessibility best practices often equate with SEO best practices, leading to improved search rankings and increased organic traffic.
This isn’t about chasing rankings; it’s about making your content easier to find and easier to use.
What to fix first (when you don’t have time to fix everything)
If time is limited, start with the elements that affect how people move through your content:
- heading
- links
- forms.
Then look at content clarity and structure. Visual refinements like colour contrast are still important, but often easier to address once the foundations are in place. Once these are in place, small, regular changes can help you improve accessibility over time:
- Include alt text every time you upload new image.
- Use correct heading structure on your new pages and blog posts.
- Check your colour combinations meet accessibility guidelines.
- Make sure links describe where they lead.
- Label form fields and buttons.
Improve content processes for better web accessibility
The WebAIM Million results suggest accessibility hasn’t become harder, it’s just become easier to overlook as websites grow more complex.
That’s why trying to fix everything at once rarely works.
In practice, the most effective approach is to start with a few consistent changes and build from there. When accessibility becomes part of how content is created and updated, it stops being an extra task and starts reducing the need for rework altogether.
The result is usually subtle but meaningful: fewer last-minute fixes, clearer content and more confidence in what you’re publishing.
And, importantly, a better experience for the people you’re trying to reach.
If you have more time and interest, W3C’s Digital Accessibility Foundations free introductory course is a good place to build your understanding further.
